Legacies' Romances Will Be Way Less Creepy Than The Vampire Diaries'

TV Guide

Thursday

Aug 9, 2018 at 8:00 AM

Much like The Vampire Diaries, Legacies, will take place in a high school full of supernatural beings, and given that it's on The CW, we can probably expect it to be filled with some seriously sexy hookups. On the other hand, showrunner Julie Plec has promised that this new series plans to avoid the problematic nature of some of the relationships established on The Vampire Diaries and The Originals.

When it comes to the vampire students on Legacies, Plec assured reporters at the Television Critics Association summer press tour that all of them would genuinely be teenagers, rather than centuries-old vampires who just happen to look like teenagers. Part of the reasoning behind that choice had to do with the fact that Plec was originally uncomfortable with The Vampire Diaries' premise that essentially had very old men falling in love and hooking up with teenage girls.

"When I read The Vampire Diaries and I thought, 'Well, God, that's weird. Stefan's technically been on this Earth for, like, 162 years and Elena's 17,' and I said I'm just going to let it go, because Edward was older," Plec said. "And, like, that was literally, like, people seem cool with Edward and Bella, so they're going to be cool with this and that's just the end of it, and I'm going to, like, just put my head down and power through."

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Times have changed though, and in the last decade (and even the last year alone), public opinion about the way young women are portrayed in media and more importantly the way romantic dynamics are portrayed has come under stricter scrutiny. The radical age difference that was acceptable in 2009 when The Vampire Diaries premiered might not have been looked on so kindly by a 2018 audience, which was also a factor in the decision not to include that trope.

"There is something deeply romantic in that gothic and harlequin romance kind of way, and deeply inappropriate if you look at it through another lens," Plec said of The Vampire Diaries' romances. "And now, in 2018, there just is only one lens in my opinion in this moment, and I'm cool with that... So it's actually we've tried to be a little bit just socially responsible for the moment. It also opened doors for us to tell vampire stories that we haven't actually told yet. So it's fun."

While fans might miss that "harlequin" element of the Delena and Stelena romances, it's at least a little bit reassuring to know that they won't have to rationalize why it's totally not creepy that Hope Mikaelson (Danielle Rose Russell) is falling into bed with a guy who could technically be 40 or 400.

Legacies premieres Thursday, Oct. 25 at 9/8c on The CW.

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